He sits down with her today, this day, and this girl puts her leg over his thigh, easy, proprietary. They are ripe with beginnings and Ruby, already, has prescribed them an ending. What’s wrong with me, she wonders. Why does she assume she knows anything at all about this young couple’s tomorrows? Surely some people find contentment and get to hold on to it. Surely, some people find their person, and stay with that person, and make babies and a life with that person. Not just some people, in fact, but most people.
Ruby is the odd one out, here.
Looking down, trying not to cry in this dingy bar, she sees her phone screen light up. Messages from Ash, three of them in a row. The first two messages must have come through when she was walking to the bar. Opening them now, Ruby sees a series of question marks, and then, time-stamped a few minutes later, a misspelled sentence asking where she was.
His latest message, fresh in her hand, is all in caps.
JESUS RUBY WHATS GOING ON?
Her text to him when she got out of the shower:
I found a dead girl today.
Ash woke up to this.
Curled up on her couch at the back of the bar, ready for another whiskey, Ruby doesn’t know how to respond. What would she say? She was mad at him, at herself, and she went for a run, and then everything changed, and now she doesn’t know what she feels at all. Maybe if she could talk to him—but she knows she can’t call, knows he won’t answer at this time of day, even as her fingers hover over his name. Eventually, she puts her phone away. She can explain what happened some other time. It’s not like he can come to her, shelter her. In the end, it doesn’t really matter.
In the end.
In the end, you can’t get back what you’ve lost. You can’t bring back the dead. There is a girl who died today, and Ruby doesn’t even know her name. She will need to wait for the police or the papers to tell her about this yellow-haired girl in her purple T-shirt, with her orange nails, and her bloody face. This girl, she thinks, would surely have something to say about all there is to lose—in the end.
Ruby’s glass is empty. She heads back to the bar, walks past the nuzzling, love-soaked couple. Wanting, suddenly, to stop and tell them she’s so very sorry. For everything that will surely come their way.
ELEVEN
‘TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED.’
Afterwards, Ruby can barely remember what she said in her official police interview. She knows Detective O’Byrne started by asking her questions about her career, why she came to New York, how often she went running. Understands he was trying hard to make her feel comfortable, mimicking the flow of a casual conversation, but the absurdity of it, sitting and talking to a homicide detective about her graphic design work back home—‘It’s great, but it’s not, um, my passion’—and how she is currently living off money once destined for a house deposit—‘My grandmother, uh, she left me $25,000 when she died’—or explaining that she tries to run every day: the madness of sharing such small details of her life made the words scramble on the way out, rearrange on her tongue, until she found she could not make sense of anything, could no longer tell what was important, and what to leave out.
She understood Detective O’Byrne would get to the river and the rocks eventually, that he was slowly guiding her there through the tangle of what came before, but she also knew she had nothing of value to offer him, no startling insight, no recovered memory pushing through to validate the way he looked at her so intently. Twenty-four hours after finding the body, Ruby had to admit she knew even less than she did when it happened.
When the interview was over, the detective thanked her for coming to the station, crinkled his dark eyes a little, kept his large fingers soft when he reached out to shake her hand. But Ruby was sure she had disappointed him yet again and had to look away. Walking home, she had the strangest feeling that she wasn’t quite there on the street anymore, was not entirely inhabiting her own body. It was like being drunk, but something more, too. A feeling that everyone around her was also drunk, and not in a pleasant end of the night way. Someone behind her coughed and it sounded like a slap. A man smiled at her and it quickly morphed into a leer. Buying fruit at Whole Foods, another man asked if she was having a nice day, and Ruby was certain he was goading her. Turning onto her street, for a brief, disorientating moment, she thought she saw the Financial Manager, the one who sent those explicit, unsolicited pictures of himself. Even the front desk guy at her apartment building seemed altered; she could feel his narrowed eyes stay on her as she waited for the lobby’s elevator doors to open. For a second, she found herself panicking that he knew which floor she lived on, maybe even had a key to her door. How had she not considered this before?